0:00 The document is a coroner’s jury testimony.0:03 It belongs to Fred G.0:05 Snow, second assistant engineer of the steamship Eastland.0:10 The words are dry, technical.0:13 But it is his obituary, published fourteen years later, that tells the real story.0:20 Like the forgotten explosion of the SS Grandcamp we examined last time, the official record is only where the story BEGINS.0:30 The truth is in the margins.0:33 July twenty-fourth, nineteen-fifteen.0:36 The air on the Chicago River is thick with summer heat and anticipation.0:42 Five thousand Western Electric employees and their families are gathering for the company’s annual picnic.0:52 They are mostly working-class, many of them immigrants.0:56 For them, this is a rare holiday.0:59 They stream towards the fleet of five steamers chartered for the day, their laughter echoing between the buildings.1:09 The first ship they are directed to is the SS Eastland.1:14 It is a long, narrow vessel, painted a gleaming white.1:19 But the paint hides a troubled history.1:22 The ship was known for its instability, a design flaw from the very beginning.1:29 It had a tendency to list, sometimes dramatically.1:33 It was top-heavy.1:35 So top-heavy that after the Titanic disaster three years prior, the mandatory addition of more lifeboats on its upper deck only made the problem WORSE.1:48 The owners had tried to fix it.1:51 They had poured tons of concrete into the hull as ballast.1:56 But they also made modifications to carry more passengers, adding weight exactly where it shouldn't be.2:05 Everyone who worked on the Great Lakes knew the Eastland was a dangerous ship.2:11 They called it the "crank." But on this morning, twenty-five hundred men, women, and children are boarding it, unaware.2:22 They are crowding the decks, waving to friends on the shore.2:27 The band is playing.2:29 The ship is still tied to the dock on the Clark Street bridge.2:34 It hasn't even begun its journey.2:37 Then, it starts to lean.2:39 A slow, gentle list to port, away from the wharf.2:43 At first, no one is concerned.2:46 Some passengers laugh, shifting their weight to the high side as a game.2:52 But the ship doesn't stop.2:54 It keeps leaning.2:56 The angle grows steeper.2:58 Crockery slides from shelves in the galley and shatters.3:03 A refrigerator tears loose and crushes a woman.3:07 Then, in a final, horrifying lurch, the Eastland rolls completely onto its side in twenty feet of murky river water.3:17 It happened in seconds.3:19 One moment, a party.3:21 The next, a tomb.3:22 Hundreds are trapped below decks.3:25 Hundreds more are thrown into the polluted river, crushed between the hull and the wharf.3:33 The final count is eight hundred and forty-four dead.3:38 Entire families, gone.3:39 Two hundred and twenty-seven of the victims were children.3:45 For weeks, the city mourned.3:47 But then… the story faded.3:49 World War One was raging in Europe, consuming the headlines.3:54 The victims were not titans of industry; they were laborers, machinists, telephone operators.4:03 People like Joseph Laycock, a fireman on duty that day, or the parents of Jewell Schubert, who survived while her mother was seven months pregnant.4:15 Their names, like the disaster itself, were allowed to recede into the archives.4:22 The Eastland was eventually righted, sold, and renamed.4:27 It served for decades more as a naval training vessel, its hull still containing the ghosts of a summer morning when every warning was ignored.
